An early AMD "Barcelona" revision gets its first non-simulated benchmark

Earlier today, AMD announced that it successfully demonstrated Barcelona across the server market. The company did not publically state how fast the processor was running, the stepping of the processor, the processor thermal envelope or the eventual ship date.

We had the opportunity to benchmark the AMD Barcelona, native quad-core on an early stepping. We only had a few minutes to test the chip, but we were able to run a quick Cinebench before we were instructed to leave.

The AMD benchmark ran on a single-socket, K10 CPU running at 1.6 GHz on NVIDIA's nForce Professional 3400 chipset. According to the system properties, the AMD system used 4GB of DDR2-667.

The most similar Intel system we could muster up on such short notice was an Intel Xeon 3220. The Xeon X3220 is clocked at 2.4 GHz, and ran on Intel's Garlow platform (Intel X38). This system property profile stated the system utilized 4GB of DDR2-800.

Cinebench completed the default benchmark in 27 seconds for the 1.6 GHz K10; 17 seconds for the Intel Xeon X3220. The Kentsfield Xeon was 58% faster with a 50% higher clock frequency for Cinebench.

Both systems ran Windows 2003 R2, 64-bit.

AMD partner engineers tell DailyTech the chip we tested was the latest revision silicon. The same engineers claim 2.0 GHz Barcelona chips are making the rounds, with 2.3 GHz already on the desktop and server roadmaps.

AMD's current guidance suggests a late July announcement for Barcelona. However, when DailyTech tracked down the individual partners named in AMD's press release, all cited "optimistic September" ship dates for motherboards.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

But this whole test is useless. It could be 17.99 sec, that would still show 17 sec. So that gives an advantage of 0.x% (could be otherwise too I know). The only this in advantage to AMD is the lower usage of watts, which is good for the server business.But for us homeusers why not release a higher wattage cpu that has a higher MHz number. Would kick Intel in every benchmark.